Ed spoke into the handset. “Zero, this is OC Six Troop. Zero, this is OC Six Troop. Contact status report. Come on—come on—answer!”
The air was thick with tension as he waited for a response. Then: “OC Six Troop, this is Zero. Go ahead.”
“Zero, OC Six Troop—sitrep: Squadron bogged down in wadi, blown six to eight wagons, split up, and forced to go on the run. We are now a mixed unit of blokes, with three LRs and one quad, facing a superior enemy force.”
“Give casualties and head count,” came the tense reply.
“Twenty-eight present with my force. No serious casualties.”
“Give call signs.”
Ed passed across the call signs of all present in his group. “We need air support,” he continued. “Repeat: we need air. Plus we need a grid for a hot extraction.”
Ed began to add something else, but there was a hollow thud and a hiss and a dazzling flash in the sky to the west as the enemy put up another illume. It was too distant to light them up completely, but
with each flare they were creeping closer. The noise of its bursting drowned out much of what Ed was saying.
“We’ve had six vehicles disappear from Blue Force Tracker,” came the call from Headquarters. “What’s happened to them?”
“Understand the situation: we got bogged down,” Ed repeated. “We blew the bogged-in vehicles. Those guys cross-decked to other wagons. That’s why we’re three LRs and one quad with twenty-eight blokes.”
“Will get helos on standby for a forty-min flight time to your position. Stand by for a grid. Repeat: Stand by for a grid.”
Ed came off the air, wiping an exhausted hand across his mud-stained features. “Zero’s finding us a grid. Plus they’re getting together some close air support for us. For now, keep heading south. Grey, you got the next map?”
“I got it,” Grey confirmed. He’d done a map change just as soon as they’d left the wadi of death, for they’d hit the edge of one forty-five-kilometer-square sheet.
For a few moments Grey and Ed studied the map together, searching for some open, flat terrain where they might call in a couple of Chinooks to carry out a hot extraction. After selecting a patch of ground, they prepared to move out.
“Any news on the others?” Grey asked.
“Nope,” Ed replied, his voice thick with worry. “There’s been nothing from HQ Troop, and the third group hasn’t come up on comms.”
“What about Blue Force Tracker? Surely they can track their position on those?”
“Zero says they’ve been trying to, but it’s total bloody confusion right now.”
Each of the wagons was fitted with a BFT (Blue Force Tracking) system—a small gizmo housed in a black box that worked via a satellite antenna. BFT was designed to send data to Headquarters on the location of each of the vehicles. In the operations room, each wagon would show up as an individual icon displayed on a giant computer screen. Each BFT unit sent a signal unique to the wagon’s call sign, so the vehicles could be tracked individually.
The BFT system also had an emergency button which sent a message akin to a Mayday call. Apparently, some of M Squadron’s Mayday buttons had been pressed. In fact, Headquarters had received Mayday calls from wagons scattered dozens of kilometers apart—which was how they’d first realized that M Squadron was in serious trouble.
But without a sitrep from anyone in the Squadron, those Mayday calls had caused total confusion at Headquarters. How could they be coming from vehicles scattered so far apart? Had some of the wagons been captured by the Iraqis, who were now tearing about in them and messing with the BFT systems? Or—as unlikely as it might seem—had an entire Squadron somehow been scattered across the Iraqi desert?
To make matters worse, half a dozen of the BFT systems had suddenly gone off the air as the wagons in the wadi of death had been blown. Understandably, that had caused chaos at Headquarters, for it seemed to show that six wagons had just been taken out by the enemy, and pretty much in one go.
As they began to wake up to what was happening to M Squadron, the SF ops room transformed into a whirlwind of activity. Ed’s sitrep had shed some welcome light on the situation, but the word from Headquarters hadn’t made things look a great deal more positive, for neither the HQ Troop nor the third force had come up on comms.
As impossible as it might seem, right now they might have lost half of the Squadron.
From the wagon to his left, Grey heard a voice start banging on about the need to split up. He didn’t recognize who it was, so it was probably a guy from Four or Five Troop. With sixty men to the Squadron, there were some you’d barely know by name, let alone be able to recognize from a few words uttered across the tense darkness.
Due west eighty kilometers or so lay the border with Syria. For most of their journey the Squadron had been paralleling it. Their final option, if all else failed, would be to try to make a run for that border, as the lads from the Bravo Two Zero patrol had done, back in 1991. But lying between the M Squadron operators and their escape route was the Iraqi hunter force, so it had to be a total nonstarter right now.
Just as soon as they’d been compromised by the Iraqi goat herder, the B2Z boys had headed for Syria, but only one of them made it. En route, the rest of the patrol was shot up, killed, or captured. Plus the one patrol member who made it into Syria on foot was hardly treated hospitably. He was arrested, beaten, and interrogated before the British government pressurized the Syrians into handing him over.
Therefore, even if the remnants of M Squadron could reach Syria, it would offer only very dubious sanctuary. The Syrian regime was no friend to the West, and it would hardly welcome half a British Special Forces squadron piling across into its territory. In spite
of this, that same voice kept going on about the need to split up: “We’ve got to split up, like they did in Bravo Two Zero. It’s the only way. We’ve got to split up.”
Finally, Grey lost it. “That’s the last fucking thing we need to do. We need to stick together. We need to stick together and find the rest of the Squadron. There are men missing out there, including the OC, and who knows what kind of shit they’re in. We need to stick together and find them, so let’s get fucking sparking.”
“But if we split into smaller groups we’re less visible,” the man continued. “We split up and head for the Syrian border—”
“If we split up we can’t coordinate the hot extraction, ’cause some wagons don’t have satcom,” Grey cut him off. “Plus, if we go in three directions, who’s heading back the way we’ve come? ’Cause that’s the suicide option. And who’s going east, further into Iraq? And even fucking west toward Syria we know there’s a shedload of enemy. Think about it. It just doesn’t fucking add up. We keep together and head south on a bearing for a hot extraction.”
“Grey’s right: no one’s splitting up,” Ed cut in. “We keep together as one unit and make for a hot-extraction grid.”
That seemed to shut the guy up.
Ed turned to Grey. “I need you to plot a course that gets us out of here and into the open desert—somewhere we can hide, in case we can’t make an extraction grid. Double-check your map-reading, ’cause we need to know exactly where we are at all times. Your wagon will take the lead. And make room, ’cause I’ll get someone riding shotgun with you to help with the mapping.”
Ed got the Rupert from Five Troop to squeeze himself into the seat beside Grey—which meant that the front of their wagon was like the proverbial sardines in a tin, especially as they still had Raggy sprawled across the hood. Luckily, the Five Troop officer was a skinny shrimp of a guy, which left Moth just about enough free space still to use the gearstick.
“Two heads are better than one,” Ed explained. “If we’re going to get the helos in for a hot extraction, we need to make fucking sure we don’t mess up on the mapping.”
Grey figured it was a fair one. But as the Pinkie pulled away he was struggling with the map sheets—and with the Rupert practically perched on his lap. It wasn’t going to make the task of navigating any the bloody easier.
“Head south,” he told Moth. “For now, make for the Southern Cross. I’ll check the maps as we go.”
The Southern Cross is a bright bluish star lying in the heart of the Milky Way, and it’s a rough pointer for south. Grey figured if they headed due south, then sooner or later they’d hit the Ninawa Desert, which should give them the space and the terrain in which to lose the enemy. If they lost their pursuers they could contact Headquarters, radio in their position, and act as a rendezvous point for the remainder of the Squadron. Hell, they might even be able to head out in a couple of the Pinkies and bring the missing men in.
As they pushed ahead at little more than a crawl, a thought struck Grey from out of the night. An image had come unbidden into his head: it was of Reggie, the Squadron OC. He was his supercool self, mug of coffee clasped in the one hand:
Okay, boy, okay, thanks for that, buddy . . . I’ll have a think on that one
. Would he still be keeping his famous cool, Grey wondered, with his Squadron scattered to the four corners and stuck in a hole as he now had to be?
Grey bloody hoped he would. The last thing they needed right now was the OC getting captured. For a British Special Forces major and SAS veteran to fall into the hands of the enemy would be a propaganda victory par excellence for the Iraqis. Not only that, the OC would be privy to all the bigger-picture intelligence about the wider war effort. He might well be a quiet, dagger-between-the-teeth kind of a guy, but the Iraqis had ways of making even the toughest talk.
It was then that he remembered Sebastian.
A spot of foreign adventure, indeed.
Their poor bloody terp must have realized by now that he’d bitten off a massive hunk of
foreign adventure
, far more than he had ever bargained for. Sebastian would be with the HQ Troop, sharing whatever fate had befallen them, and if the Iraqis got hold of him, Grey dreaded to think what they might do to him.
Moth was struggling to pick a route through the rough landscape. The night was black as hell and it made for impossible driving, especially with a wagon as overburdened as theirs. But on one level, that was the least of their worries right now. Suddenly there was the howl of an incoming round. Right in the path of the vehicle out front—Gunner’s lone quad—was an almighty great explosion.
For an instant, Grey saw Gunner and the officer riding pillion silhouetted against the white-hot blast. He figured with the next shell the both of them would be pulverized. But an instant later Gunner spun the quad into a crazed turn to the right to get them out of the line of fire. Moth followed his lead, the men hanging on to the rear of the wagon practically being thrown off as he threw it into a screaming turn.
The second he did so, a shell aimed with pinpoint accuracy slammed into the patch of desert that they’d just vacated. Blasted rock and sand hammered into the rear of their Pinkie, the shock wave rocking it savagely from side to side. They were under fire from what had to be those enemy tanks, the T-72 Lions of Babylon, unleashing their massive, fearsome 125mm shells.
This time Grey didn’t need to tell Gunner to pull his throttle to the max. Ahead of him the quad shot ahead like a bullet out of a gun, and—damn the men hanging on to their vehicle—Moth floored the Pinkie’s accelerator. All three wagons started to buck and kangaroo their way across the terrain, the extra men hanging on for dear life.
None of the Pinkies could return fire, for their extra passengers were blocking their arcs of fire. Even if they could have done so, there was jack shit they could do against those T-72s. Their only hope was to try to outrun them and disappear into the dark desert.
Those in the back of Grey’s wagon were on their feet now, using their knees to cushion the blows as the vehicle hurtled into dips and off ridges, their hands gripped tight to whatever they could find close by. Yet, no matter how hard Moth pushed the Pinkie, the hunter force kept coming.
Grey could sense the 12.7mm Dushka rounds tearing past overhead now as blast waves from further salvos of 125mm tank shells
pounded them from either side. He figured the T-72s had opened up from no more than a kilometer away. Most likely, the enemy armor had sneaked closer while they were doing their head count, hoping to tear them apart from point-blank range.
As the wagons had got on the move again, the tank commander must have decided to hammer in the rounds anyway. The only thing that was preventing the wagons from getting hit was the way Gunner was weaving the convoy through any patches of cover he could find, plus the thick blanket of darkness.
But they were at the total mercy of the elements right now. If the cloud cover cleared and the moon came out, they’d be finished. They had an enemy force closing on them, and they were plowing ahead as fast as their vehicles could go. If the clouds blew over and the sky brightened, they’d be silhouetted in the moonlight, and they’d be toast.
As they careered across the terrain Grey’s wagon went flying over a ridge with a sharp drop on the far side. For a good few seconds the Pinkie was airborne, and then the wheels hit the deck with a tortured groan as the weight of the human and other cargo slammed down. There was a horrible crack as the springs bottomed out. Moth fought to control the speeding vehicle as the heavier rear end tried to slide forward and overtake the front, sending them into a wild spin.
Moth won the battle and wrestled the Pinkie under control again. Grey was tempted to tell him to slow it a little. A couple more incidents like that, and the wagon was surely going to shake itself apart. But to their rear the Iraqi tanks were coming on fast, and the only option they had was to run and run. There was only so much battle damage a Land Rover could take, and he feared theirs was fast approaching the limits of its endurance.
Another worrying thought struck Grey: Where the hell were the Fedayeen? They had armor to their rear hammering in the 125mm shells, but the militia were nowhere to be seen. Their Toyotas were way faster than the Pinkies, and they were very likely familiar with the terrain here. Grey couldn’t help but think they were going to run into those bastard Fedayeen sometime soon.